Postcards from the Edge

When we first meet the extraordinary young actress Suzanne Vale, she's feeling like "something on the bottom of someone's shoe, and not even someone interesting." Suzanne is in the harrowing and hilarious throes of drug rehabilitation, trying to understand what happened to her life and how she managed to land in a "drug hospital." Just as Fisher's first film role-the precocious teenager in Shampoo-echoed her own Beverly Hills upbringing, her first book is set within the world she knows better than anyone else: Hollywood. More of a fiction montage than a novel in the conventional sense, this stunning literary debut chronicles Suzanne's vivid, excruciatingly funny experiences-from the clinic to her coming to terms with life in the outside world. Conversations with her psychiatrist-"What worries me is, what if this guy is really the one for me and I haven't had enough therapy to be comfortable with having found him?"; a high-concept, eighties-style affair-"The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure. My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody and then I notice when they're not there?" Sparked by Suzanne's-and Carrie Fisher's-deliciously wry sense of the absurd, Postcards from the Edge is more than a book about stardom and drugs. It is a revealing look at the dangers-and delights-of all our addictions, from money and success to sex and insecurity.